There is no greater insult
to the memory of the 6 million than to exploit their deaths, as the Holocaust Education Trust does, in order to
legitimise Israel’s foul racism
Below is yet another excellent article from Gavin Lewis, Israel, Holocaust and the Un-existing of Black Victimhood. It has prompted me to write an introduction which is longer than the article itself. My apologies but it’s a topic that doesn’t lend itself to brevity!
If you Google
‘books on genocide in Belgian Congo’ you
come up with just one book. Adam
Hochschild’s King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and
Heroism in Colonial Africa. If you type in ‘Nazi
holocaust’ then you have an endless selection.
There are literally thousands of books, from every conceivable angle,
on aspects of the Holocaust. Most are worthless but nonetheless no respectable
library is without a shelf (at least).
How is it that the Jewish Holocaust (because there are few books on the
other victims – the Disabled, Gypsies, Russian POWs, Political Prisoners,
Jehova Witnesses) has received such attention yet the genocide of Black
Africans has not?
In these days of Black Lives
Matter there is one, obvious, answer. White lives matter more. Yet this is
not the whole answer, indeed it is not even half an answer. The Irish Famine is
also not top of the book lists. Admittedly the British killed ‘only’ one
million but the accepted figure of Jewish dead in the Holocaust is 6 million.
The estimated number of dead in the Belgian Congo is 10 million. The estimated death
from the Slave Trade is about 14 million.
Of course the industrial extermination of the Jews of Europe was, by
any stretch of the imagination, horrific.
But was death by gas or shooting worse than castration, chopping off of
limbs, burning and skinning alive. It took minutes to expire from bullets or
cyanide gas, whereas the tortures of the Belgian colonial sadists are
unimaginable.
One thing is for certain. It isn’t about the special place of Jews
before the anti-Semites get their heartbeats racing. Indeed for a long time
after the Holocaust there were very few books about the Holocaust written,
albeit they were the best. Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of European Jewry,
Gerald Reitlinger’s The Final Solution and Gerald Fleming’s Hitler and the
Final Solution. Today there are more good histories such as Richard Evan’s
trilogy on the Third Reich and Christopher Browning’s The Origins of the
Final Solution.
In post-war
America the Holocaust was played down to the point of non-existence. During the
McCarthy era emphasising the Holocaust was likely to incur accusations of being
a Communist. At the funeral for the executed Rosenbergs the Song of the Warsaw
Ghetto was sung.
Nor was the
Israeli state any different. In the late 1940s and early 1950s the Holocaust was barely mentioned in
Israel. In a 220 page Israeli history textbook published in 1948, just one page
was devoted to the Holocaust compared to 10 pages on the Napoleonic wars.
[Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, p. 94]
Why the change and when did it start
to come about? Both Peter Novick [the Holocaust in American Life] and Norman
Finkelstein [the Holocaust Industry] agree that the change began after Israel’s
victory in the 6 Day War in 1967. By defeating Egypt’s President Nasser and
slaying the dragon of Arab nationalism, Israel had proved its utility to US
imperialism. It represented a dagger at the heart of the Arab East.
In Israel itself attitudes began to
change with the show trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. Eichmann was, of course, guilty of all that
he was accused of and deserved to hang but that wasn’t the point of the trial.
It wasn’t to reveal information so much
as to begin the process of using the Holocaust as a source of Israel’s
legitimation. Israel claimed the Holocaust as its inheritance, as well as a
source of financial reparations.
Previously Holocaust victims had been
seen as a source of shame in Israel.
Unlike the brave Israelis, who slaughtered Arabs without mercy, yea even
the suckling on a mother’s breast, the Jews who went to the gas chambers were
seen as cowards.
Hayyim Nahman Bialik |
Hayyim
Nahman Bialik, the national Zionist poet, spoke
of the ‘disgraceful shame and cowardice’ of
the Jewish victims of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom. Yitzhak Greenbaum, of the Jewish Agency Executive Committee,
spoke of ‘unparalleled feelings of
burning shame.’ ‘Sheep to the
slaughter’ in
the words of Eichmann’s prosecutor Gideon Hausner.
The first Holocaust survivors to
arrive in Palestine were called sapon
(soap) after the myth that the bodies of victims were made into soap.
Hanzi Brand wrote of how, when she
settled on Kibbutz Gvata Haim, the other members ‘talked about their war to avoid hearing about hers. They were ashamed
of the Holocaust.’ [Tom Segev, The 7th Million, p. 471]
Peter Novick spoke of the
prevailing view in the Yishuv that holocaust survivors represented the ‘survival of the worst.’ In Ben Gurion’s
view they were
‘hard, evil and selfish people and their experiences destroyed what good
qualities they had left.’
Ben Gurion went on to add
that they were
‘A mob and human dust,
without language, without education, without roots and without being absorbed
in tradition and the nation’s vision.’
David Ben Gurion,
Israel’s first Prime Minister had already demonstrated during the war his
indifference to the genocide of Europe’s Jews. His only concern was that the extermination
of Europe’s Jews would render the establishment of a Jewish state irrelevant
and reduc the number of immigrants to Israel.
Ben Gurion’s official biographer,
Shabtai Teveth quoted Ben Gurion as saying that
‘where there was a conflict
of interest between saving individual Jews and the good of the Zionist
enterprise, we shall say that the enterprise comes first.’ (The Burning Ground,
p. 855)
It is therefore clear that the
obsession, because it is an obsession, with the Jewish holocaust and the almost
complete ignoring of, for example, the British genocide in Bengal which killed
an estimated 32 million people, has nothing to do with genuine horror.
We can see that quite clearly with
Holocaust Memorial Day which excludes all genocide before the Nazi
Holocaust. So there is no mention of the
Armenian Holocaust, the Slave Trade or what happened in the Belgian Congo. Why?
What possible logic is there for time limiting which Holocausts are deserving
of attention?
The only conclusion is that the Nazi holocaust
of the Jews serves a major ideological and propaganda purpose in terms of
legitimising western imperialism and capitalism. The Nazi Holocaust makes western capitalism seem anti-racist
whereas in fact the way it is used is to reinforce its racism and imperialism. There
simply is no other explanation.
If you go to the Holocaust Memorial Day
Trust’s web
page on the Holocaust it tells you that ‘The
Holocaust (The Shoah in Hebrew) was the attempt by the Nazis and their
collaborators to murder all the Jews in Europe.’ The page
on the Holocaust deals exclusively with the Jews. It says nothing about the Euthenasia
campaign between 1939-1941 when about 100,000 mentally and physically
handicapped Germans were murdered, mainly by carbon monoxide poisoning.
As Henry Friedlander’s excellent The
Origins of Nazi Genocide argues, the Holocaust began in 1939 not 1941/2. The
very same gas trucks used to murder the disabled, and German Jewish disabled
were singled out in particular, made their way to Chelmno, near Lodz in Poland
and there they established the first extermination camp in December 1941.
This prioritisation of the Jewish holocaust
is not only racist but it’s also bad history.
It treats the Holocaust, in the words of Tom Segev, as a ‘bizarre cult of memory, death and kitsch’ in
which false memory is used to bolster the Zionist narrative of eternal
anti-Semitism.
The deliberate use of the Holocaust
as a propaganda weapon is illustrated by another organisation, the Holocaust Education Trust. Set up by the
late paedophile and President of the Board of Deputies Lord Greville Janner, it is now presided over by
Karen Pollock, who played a bit role in the fantasy drama of ‘Labour
anti-Semitism’.
The HET is a wholly Zionist outfit
and Pollock has shamelessly used the HET, a charity, to bolster the fiction
that the Labour Party was institutionally anti-Semitic and to plug the IHRA.
What has the Holocaust got to do with
the IHRA’s Working Definition of Anti-Semitism?
The latter, conflates Zionism and anti-Semitism and it is sponsored by
the racist International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Britain’s delegate to the IHRA is right-wing
Tory Eric Pickles, former Chair of Conservative Friends of Israel, an
anti-Muslim and anti-Roma bigot who also defended the Tory alliance with
fascists and anti-Semites in the European Parliament.
These Zionists have no shame in exploiting the Holocaust for the cause of Israel |
Among those who back the IHRA is Hungary’s
anti-Semitic Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the United States’s White Supremacist
President Trump and a host of anti-Semitic leaders in Western Europe. The IHRA is a definition that anti-Semites love.
The IHRA, which has been condemned
as ‘unfit for purpose’ by Geoffrey
Robertson QC has nothing whatever to do with the Holocaust or Holocaust Education.
The use of the HET and the Holocaust by pro-Israel propagandists explains
exactly why the Holocaust has been turned into solely the Jewish Holocaust.
Karen Pollock - Zionist nonentity who exploits the Holocaust on behalf of Israel's apartheid regime |
Pollock herself is a nonentity, a
two-bit player in the Zionist game but her poisonous racist view that to attack
and criticise Zionism is anti-Semitic besmirches the memory of the Jewish
victims of the Holocaust, the overwhelming majority of whom were not Zionist.
The real
record of the Zionists during the Holocaust is not one to be proud of. They
first denied the Holocaust having welcomed the rise of the Nazi government as a
golden opportunity to strengthen the Jewish state-in-the making. Ben Gurion said
of the beginning of the war, which sealed the fate of German and Poland Jewry,
that it was ‘'a rare opportunity to achieve the “Zionist solution”, the only true
solution to the problem of the Jewish people
Berl
Katznelson, Ben Gurion’s deputy, saw the rise of Hitler to power as ‘“an opportunity to build and flourish
like none we have ever had or ever will have”.
Gavin
Lewis’s article is therefore very welcome and I hope that you find it
stimulating.
Tony
Greenstein
Israel, Holocaust and the Un-existing of Black Victimhood
Gavin Lewis
Media December 24, 2019
In his book The Holocaust Industry, political
scientist Norman Finkelstein argues that an ideological construct has taken
shape around the Holocaust that is used to cloak Israel with the status of
“victim state” despite its “horrendous” human rights record. One of the key
planks of this ideology is the notion of ‘uniqueness’, both of the European
Holocaust and of Western Jews as victims.
In November 2019, Roger Hallam, one of the founders of the
environmental movement Extinction Rebellion, was caught up in a highly
controversial media storm in which he was accused of anti-Semitism. Hallam had
contradicted the ideology Finkelstein had identified, describing the Holocaust
as just another genocide—as he phrased it “just another fuckery in human
history“—which, by example, he compared
to the death toll in the Belgian Congo.
The constructed media notion of supposed offence to European Jews was
highly specialised in that it was restricted to white, heterosexual,
able-bodied, politically conservative victims. If insult had been genuinely
given by Hallam it was also an offence to gay, disabled, black and leftist
victims of Nazi eugenics and extermination policies.
Germany had been occupied at the close of the First World War by
French-African colonial troops branded the ‘Black Horror’ by the Germans. The colonial troops fathered a generation of mixed
race Germans known pejoratively as ‘Rhineland Bastards’ who were smeared as
‘half apes’ by Adolf Hitler in his autobiographical screed, Mein Kampf.
These inconvenient black victims are hardly ever mentioned in the
Western media’s Holocaust-invoking, pro-Israel reportage; though they, along
with the disabled and gay, were among the first to be victims of Nazi
sterilisation and forced euthanasia policies.
Martin Niemoller |
Similarly, political victims of the Nazis are now also excluded from
mention, despite the fact that the resonant postwar reflection about fascist
oppression was Martin Niemöller’s poem beginning, “First they came for the communists, and I did not speak
out—because I was not a communist (Then they came for the trade unionists, and
I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist).”
Ironically the left, and particularly the UK Labour Party, were the
prime targets of the pro-Israel media witchhunt, which has demonstrated both
the totalitarian nature of attacks on ordinary working-class socialists and the
strategic function of excluding them from the list of historic Nazi victims. It
is also worth recalling that the people that actually fought during the Second
World War and were responsible for postwar reconstruction used the inclusive
term ‘Nazi Crimes against Humanity’. Decades later we have—as Finkelstein has
observed—slipped into using highly selective labels like Shoah and Holocaust
which implicitly create a hierarchy of victimhood.
As for Hallam’s comparative comments, Adam Hothschild, in his history King Leopold’s Ghost, cites the
Belgians killing of 10 million Africans in the Congo. This genocide was caused
by a horrific regime of mass castrations, floggings and starvation on an almost
industrial scale.
The horrors of the Belgian Congo are so well established in history that
Mark Twain can be cited as one of the early anti-colonial campaigners against
the slaughter. The missionary Alice Seeley Harris photographed the colonial disciplinary practice of cutting off the
hands of the children who had, held in forced labour, failed to meet rubber
harvest quotas (see image below). The death toll of victims from this practice
was considerable, and the collection of hands became a form of currency by
which soldiers proved they’d upheld colonial authority and carried out their
kill rates.
However, the weight of historical evidence does not shame those
political and media elites who structured Labour’s moral panic upon a hierarchy
of victimhood privileging a specific white ethnic identity. The black-Jewish
political activist Jackie Walker similarly tried to point out
that victims of slavery were absented from Holocaust Memorial Day. The fact
that a figure of “60 million and more” has long been the accepted number of
victims of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and even featured in Toni Morrison’s
Pulizer Prize-winning novel Beloved did not protect Walker from
being smeared as a anti-Semite.
Walker, however, was correct: slavery and the other colonial Holocausts
that—like the state of Israel—are a manifestation of white settler domination,
are systematically excluded from Holocaust Memorial Day. The same media that
claims to care about anti-Semitism covers up this racist double standard rather
than treat it as a scandal. In fact, strategies of black Holocaust denial were
a feature of Cathy Newman’s infamous interview with Walker on Britain’s Channel
4 News in September 2016.
The largest Holocaust in human history is not included in Holocaust
Memorial Day, and is now rarely mentioned in contemporary media coverage of the
event. David Stannard, in his book American Holocaust, cites 100 million killed in the conquest of the Americas. In the
United States you can hardly bump into a Native American; there are now about
6.5 million left, often ghettoised in the reservation system, out of a general
population of 327 million.
Ursula K. Le Guin |
In the week both before and after Hallam’s comments, the BBC twice
broadcast a biographical documentary about the novelist Ursula K. Le Guin. In the film, Le Guin talked
about her parents, anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and his wife Theodora’s
friendship with Ishi, the last surviving member of the Native American Yahi
people. When Ishi died, his tribe died with him. So within the timeframe that
Hallam was being smeared, popular culture was highlighting that an ethnic group
can actually become extinct due white colonial Holocaust. Yet this
extermination was still being given subordinate treatment compared to to white
Western victims.
The UK establishment has a vested interest in downplaying the horrors of
historic Western imperialism. The British had torture camps in Kenya, and have
recently had to compensate victims of torture and military rape in colonial
Cyprus. Britain’s conquest of a quarter of the planet was facilitated by a
eugenics ideology in which the victims of imperialism were (whatever their
ethnic identity) regarded as interchangeable lesser human ‘wogs’, a term that
originated as a slur targeted at the African disapora but was used throughout
the empire.
A Congolese
man looking at the severed hand and foot of his five-year-old daughter who was
killed, and allegedly cannibalized, by the members of Anglo-Belgian India
Rubber Company militia. Photo by Alice Seeley Harris.
The extent of the death toll in colonial India was described by
historian Mike Davis in his book Late Victorian Holocausts.
Contradicting the media spin that colonial deaths took place over a much longer
time period than the Nazi Holocaust, historian Amaresh Mishra in his book War of Civilisations: 1857 cited how the British, in putting down an Indian uprising, presided
over “untold Holocaust” which caused the deaths of almost 10 million people
over 10 years beginning in 1857.
The historian and former UN under Secretary General Shashi Tharoor
recorded the figure of 35 million deaths attributable to the entire history of
the British Raj in his books Inglorious Empire and An Era of Darkness. Again, this death toll is not mentioned on Holocaust Memorial Day.
The only qualitative difference between white settler Holocausts and
Nazi crimes is that the Western empires and independent colonies relied on
mixed military slaughter and methods derived from the theories of population
sustainability popularized by cleric and scholar Thomas Robert Malthus, whereby
disease and starvation were deliberately imposed on Indigenous peoples. The
Nazis, by comparison, utilized the machinery of militarism coupled with Fordist
industrialised methods. There is, however, no reason outside of racism and
complicity in the ideology of global Western expansionism to explain away why
black and brown deaths should be treated as somehow subordinate or
second-class.
An early example of German empire envy illustrates the lack of genuine
demarcation between Western colonial Holocausts and later Nazi crimes. In 1904,
many years before the Nazis came to power, Germany exterminated 75 percent
of the Herero tribe in Namibia (amounting
to 60,000 people), and embarked on a horrific project of human experimentation
on tribal survivors that was later resumed against Europeans—including an
overwhelming number of western Jews—in Second World War death camps. For black
historians like Clarence Lusane and Tina Campt, the Nazis simply brought
Western colonial, eugenics-motivated slaughter back to the European mainland.
Isn’t the corporate media being racially selective about which victims matter,
simply replicating Nazi racist hierarchies?
Perhaps the answer is that racist double standards of the comparative
value of human life and Nazi rhetoric are with us once again, covertly
advancing the agendas of both the Israeli colonial project and those who
champion the current manifestation of Western imperialism. Israel not only
oppresses the Indigenous Palestinian population, it has subjected black Jews to
long-term forced contraception injections, established neighbourhoods operating
whites-only housing policies, and authorized hospitals to dump so-called ‘black
blood’ donations as unclean. However, based on the ‘uniqueness narrative,’ the International Holocaust
Remembrance Coalition (IHRC) working definition of anti-Semitism attempts to exempt Israel from scrutiny of racist practices. This begs
the question: If Israel could stand up to examination on these issues, why
would it need an exemption from scrutiny?
The US-led Western powers are responsible for over a million deaths in
Iraq plus more across the region. In subsequent election campaigns, Guardian
columnist Polly Toynbee suggested voters should ignore the death toll and
instead vote New Labour on the basis of its alleged investments in
infrastructure. This was a version of the old Nazi apologist mantra “never mind the death camps, look at the
autobahn”. More recently, Nick Robinson of the supposedly impartial BBC
characterised criticism of Western imperialism as “a failure to support our armed forces”. Interestingly, this is the
same slur Nazis hurled at the German White Rose Peace activists they
persecuted.
Much of the rhetoric supporting the new imperialism—particularly the
spin of people like Nick Robinson—is based upon a traditional ‘civilising the
primitive savage’ ideology. Within this framework, the black and brown peoples
of the world are supposedly too inferior for their countries to be permitted to
evolve, make mistakes and develop without violent Western exploitation. The
enormous number of deaths from historic and ongoing conquests are subsequently
‘buried’ in corporate media coverage.
It is interesting to reflect, even on recent history, where these
notions of innate Western superiority versus Indigenous inferiority have led
us; sometimes characterised as ‘the onward march of Western civilisation’. Long
after the Second World War, when the West had supposedly learned from failing
to recognise the humanity of white Europeans, the stuffed and mounted bodies of
black and Indigenous peoples were still to be found in Western museums as
examples of ethnic primitiveness. The Negro of Banyoles, a controversial piece of
taxidermy of a San individual, which used to be a major attraction in the
Darder Museum of Banyoles, was only returned to Africa in 2000 after activists
had shamed the neighbouring 1998 Barcelona Olympics and subsequently kept up
their protests. The Royal Society of Tasmania kept Truganini’s remains until 1976 and the
French only returned Saartjie Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus, in 2002.
Currently, it appears horrified indignation at racism is now only to be
expressed within a hierarchy of victimhood, strategically sympathetic to those
supporting a global ideology of the onward march of white Western civilisation.
Gavin Lewis
is a freelance black-British mixed-race writer and academic. He has published
in Australia, Britain, Canada and the United States on film, media, politics,
cultural theory, race and representation. He has taught critical theory, film
and cultural studies at a number of British universities.
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